In 1932 Giacometti wrote: "Against, Absolutely. Playful yes, erotic yes, worried yes, destructive yes". This statement is contemporary of Boule Suspendue and Objet désagréable à jeter; these works reveal a crisis of the form. Around 1935, Giacometti turned back to life model, leading to tiny figurines of plaster that a simple stab of knife could give back to dust. Between the surrealists objects and those sculptures interpreted in an existentialist perspective this "fracture" could be reformulated as a bi-polar opposition between form and formless. Considering these works and the historical artistic framework between the early 1930s and the immediate postwar period, a dialectic evaluation involving these notions could allow us to revalue this fracture.

Under this title borrowed from Henri Focillon's book (The Life of Forms in Art, 1943), I am proposing to study the unexpected recurrence of biological references in theoretical texts by Oulipian writers: in what ways do these metaphors of life prove useful to authors who explicitly claim to write under (mathematical) constraints? The purpose of this essay is to show that this apparent paradox is part and parcel of an aesthetical legitimation : the aim of which is to give the unitary form of romantic ceuvre to fabricated -- i.e. necessarily contingent -- texts.

Originally a former Harvard music /musicology student, Harry Mathews also took great interests in the 60s US and French visual arts and artists, widely alluded in most of his narratives and even spectacularly included as elements of fiction. Considering the important role of restrictive forms and process in this prose, this essay focuses on the diflerenr ways the narrators and the fiction intend to reshape through Art a messy and chaotic World.

Jean-Marie Gleize's essay « Pourquoi je joue du tam-tam maintenant » (Altitude zero) is inspired by Henri Michaux's reconsideration of the sonorous aspects of poetry in «Premières Impressions» (Passages). Gleize uses Michaux's treatment of symmetry and dissymmetry to examine the interplay between form and its absence. He appropriates Michaux's gesture to situate poetry today, presenting a summary of his theoretical position on the poetic tendencies of our time such as the reconsideration of form. Several critical analyses of Gleize's parodic text «Le sonnet comme mystere formel. Contribution à l'ambiance photographique » (Non) demonstrate how Gleize plays with the asymptotic relationship between form and its absence in a number of essays and in a series of texts with the recurrent title « Film à Venir ». Gleize uses repetition, semantic and sonorous drumming, to introduce form into a body of work lacking conventional formal organization.

Nouvelles Impressions d'Aftique differs radically from Raymond Roussel's previous works : it is not a fictional narrative and does not describe any kind of spectacle. Roussel, who had previously endeavoured to create a world altogether removed from reality, but intrinsically coherent, now seems to reinvent himself as a philosopher intent on documenting the meaninglessness of the world. As a result of language becoming totally divorced from the world, the phantasmogoria and fantastic machinery of his earlier pieces gives way to a tireless inventory of a fragmented reality and of the lies inherent in representation.

This essay, based on three operative cencepts. "Installation", "Movement", "Allegory", proposes several discursive analyses of texts by French and American poets (Mallarmé, Isidore lsou, Denis Roche, Jean-Marie Gleize, Charles Bernstein, Rob Perelman, etc.). All have explored the possibility of a plastique poetry and have composed texts of extreme poetry that rely on technospectacular textual techniques to bring the readership back to poetry. Because, as commonly agreed, one cannot say everything, today there is the need for poetry to reinvent itself as a visual mode of signification that can show the unspeakable. Through the visual space opened by new digital technologies, poetry should invent the new formulations of our everyday life. Beyond words, sentences and the Book. With this new self defined project, poetry is no longer simply a literary genre; it becomes the new space where mankind experiences a new mode of readability. This plastique literature is inventing new forms that map out the paradox : how to express what has always been without: expression, the very core of poetic inquiry.